The Dark Command
by MrPointy2
Summary: The final story in the Buffy/Ringworld Trilogy
1. Chapter 1

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Slayers dreamed of fire.

In their dreams they saw a burning sky. They saw white clouds turn into black clots of smoke. They saw the horizon ripped in red. They saw the moon covered in a sheet of orange flames.

They saw the Earth burn

They saw forests with carpets of green began to smoke and then burst into flame. They saw a thousand miles of ice in the arctic shelf melt into water and then turn into steam. They saw the edges of the world melt as the continents became huge pools of molten lava.

They saw the world become a star. The planet blossomed into a plume of searing white light a hundred times brighter than its sun. They felt seven billion people die.

Two hundred slayers screamed simultaneously in a long hellish chorus across the world. There was terror in their eyes and a fear they could not name. They were strong women. That did not keep a few of them from crying. They had just felt the world die and it weighted heavy on their souls.

Willow was in the room with Rona when the vision occurred. She noticed the slim African-American slayer roll her eyes upwards and then lean backwards on the chair she was sitting on. Willow was on her way to find out what was wrong with her when Rona bolted upright and emitted a long pitiful wail.

"Please, No!" She moaned. "Please, no!" Rona held Willow by her shoulders and looked directly at her. "They're dead Willow. Billions are dead." There were tears in the corners of her eyes. Her hands trembled.

In the back room Willow could hear the Buffy-Baby crying.

It took almost an hour to arrange a conference call that covered all of the major continents. Willow took the call in her apartment. She was de-facto in charge until she could figure out a way to return Buffy back to normal. It had been six months since she had turned Buffy into a baby by mistake. The ringworld she and Buffy had discovered a few years ago contained trillions of miles of superconductive cable which produced large scale quantum entanglement events. The Ringworld was spooky action at a distance that distorted all of the magic on Earth. Willow was trying to heal Buffy when the magic took her literately and returned Buffy to her infant state. Buffy was for all intent an 18 month old baby girl and she was still a Slayer.

It took every skill she had acquired in the last six months to calm the Buffy-Baby down and get her back to sleep. Willow watched the baby for a long time. She could tell the baby was still in the grips of the disturbing vision.

"Hawaii Online."

"China Online"

"Japan Online"

"Russia Online"

One by one the nations checked in. Willow was glad she'd paid her phone bill this month.

"Rona." Willow said to the slayer who was recovering from her vision. "Go."

Rona moved up to the speakerphone that sat at the center of Willow's dining room table.

"I've seen the world destroyed." She said flatly. There was a chorus of agreements from the speakerphone. "The fire came from everywhere and nowhere." She said.

"I saw the Minsk River explode." The Russian Slayer said to no one in particular.

Rona continued.

"I know it wasn't natural. It didn't feel natural. But it didn't feel like magic. The Earth didn't just blow up, it was destroyed. Something reached out and blew the Earth into a million pieces. I felt all of is die."

Rona's voice went up a notch. Willow could feel Rona's pain. She could hear expressions of sorrow from the Slayers across the world. The thing they had seen had rocked them to the core.

"What are we going to do?" The British slayer asked.

"Yeah, luv, what _are_ you going to do? A familiar voice said from behind Willow and Rona.

It was Spike.

Rona was on her feet in a microsecond. She turned to tackle the vampire and went right through him. Rona crashed into a book case, righted herself and then turned to face Spike. That's when she noticed that she could see right through him.

"Are you a ghost?" Rona asked.

"I prefer the term 'high frequency tachyon transmission'." Spike said.

That's when Rona noticed that Spike was wearing a black single one piece suit that seemed to absorb all the light that came near it.

"Aren't you dead?" Willow asked. Her face held shock and amazement and then joy. Spike was alive. He hadn't died when they closed the hellmouth last year.

"Aren't I usually?" He responded. "I mean I am a vampire."

"The Hellmouth!" Willow yelled. "We thought you died when we closed the Hellmouth. You sacrificed yourself to save us all."

The image of Spike looked at her weirdly then moved away. Willow could see that he was in some sort of laboratory.

"What year is this? Spike asked.

"2004." Someone on the speakerphone answered.

Spike rolled his eyes. "I barely made it." He said. "So, I save the world, again, huh? Was I cool or what?"

"Spike!" Hundreds of women screamed at him from across the world.

Willow walked up to him. "The slayers have been having dreams about the end of the world."

"I know." Spike said. "It's the Ringworld. It's covering all of its bases."

Willow looked at him blankly.

"In about three months, the Ringworld is going to figure out a way to turn twenty percent of the Earth into antimatter. Then boom."

"Why?" Willow asked all business.

Spike returned Willows stare.

"It's you red. The ringworld wants to kill you."

I want to give a shout out of all my homies over at .. It's full of kooks now but back in the day we were young and full of dreams (of destroying the earth).

../topics?start=10&sa=N


	2. Chapter 2

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

"Wants me dead?" Willow said. She was in open mouth shock.

"Yeah, seems the ringworld considers you a threat." Spike looked at her for a moment. "What have you been up to red?"

Willow looked pensive. She was looking for words to explain.

"I gave the ringworld a soul. I gave it a part of my soul." She said. Willow left out the part about combining it with the essence of her evil twin from another universe.

"Normally, suddenly getting a soul is enough to drive any soulless thing crazy with remorse for a short time. I have no idea what getting a soul does to a machine that's been around for hundreds of thousands of years."

Willow looked puzzled. Spike answered her.

"The Ringworld is over two hundred thousand years old. I'm going with the crazy as hell theory." Spike said.

Willow was staring at him strangely.

"What?" He said.

"You're alive." She said with a smile on her face. "You're alive."

Spike could tell Willow desperately wanted to hug him. He could hear whispering on the speakerphone. The slayers were all a buzz with Spikes return.

Spike attempted to deflect the oncoming display of emotions. Where's Buffy? Don't tell her I I'm alive. I want to see the expression on her face myself." He said.

"Not a problem." Willow said with a certain amount of understated irony. "Spike why are you here?" Willow asked.

"Need a favor red. I need you to recreate the Gem of Amara. "He said.

"You want me to recreate a ring that makes you indestructible? Why?" Willow asked.

"I'm going to war against the Ringworld. It killed Buffy. It killed my Buffy." Spike looked both sad and angry at the same time. Through the frown on his face he bared his teeth. It simply uncreated the Buffy that got copied to the Ringworld. It didn't even ask her if she wanted to continue living. It just took her!"

"If she wanted to continue living?" Willow was puzzled. "Was she hurt? Was she in pain?"

It took Spike a moment to understand Willows confusion.

"No, no nothing like that. When Future-Buffy transferred your Buffy into the future the transfer got messed up. Messed up in the sense that it wasn't exactly like the Buffy-Protector remembered. At the moment the transfer was changed the timeline was altered. The Ringworld fixed that by anchoring the Buffy-Protector to this reality with a set of quantum calculations you could call a realty altering spell. The Ringworld simply ended the spell and uncreated the Buffy-Protector."

"Spike."

"Yes."

"What's a Buffy-Protector?"

Spike rolled his eyes. "Just call her Buffy."

"Ok. So your Buffy is gone. What about the bad copy that was pulled through time? She should be around somewhere?" Willow said.

Spike smacked his forehead. "I can't believe I just now got that. There's a second Buffy running around the Ringworld and a second Dawn. I wonder what she's like."

"Something else you should keep an eye on Spike." Willow said. "The magics of the Slayer are not affected by the Ringworld antics. Slayers are still slayers."

"So?"

"So, when the Ringworld uncreated your Buffy-Protector it essentially killed her. "

It took Spike a moment to put the pieces together.

"Someone got chosen. There's a new ringworld slayer running around somewhere and I'm still a vampire."

"Do you have a soul?" Willow asked suddenly worried.

"Yes, but not the way you think. I wear my soul on the outside. My soul is in my skin."

Spike was about to speak again when his laboratory was rocked by explosions. The slayers could hear the sounds of gun fire in the background.

"Gotta go luv. Got a war to fight. "Spike stopped a moment to stare at Willow. "Recreate my ring, Willow and I'll kill Ouroboros myself."

Spike's image disappeared in fire and smoke.

The room was silent for a moment then all the Slayers began to speak at once. In the back room, the Buffy-Baby began to cry.

His command center was under attack.

Spike stood in the center of the pentagram, protected from the chaos around him. The Fist-Of-God Mountain was under siege. Within hours of announcing to Ouroboros that he was going to kill him, the Hellmouth that he had stood guardian over had opened fully.

Thousands of demons poured out of it.

The few automated defenses he had was overwhelmed. Spike had been fighting them for days.

"In retrospect, it's probability not the wisest thing to tell an all powerful being you're going to kill it." He thought.

Ouroboros had opened the Hellmouth and poured down his wraith upon Spike.

He pushed the dying body of something that looked like a cross between a bear and a pig off of him as he pulled Buffy's scythe out of its bleeding body.

"Screw this nonsense. I'm out of here." Spike pressed the ordnance detonator around his waist. He had just armed several metric tons of high explosives.

He pressed a certain spot on his chest and teleported out.

The explosion could be seen for miles. It produced a sound pressure level high enough to kill everything within a five mile radius.

Spike appeared in a cave. He could see the smoke billowing from Fist-Of-God Mountain. His black jumpsuit still sparkled from the teleport. Years ago he had learned how to tap into the Ringworlds superconductive grid and take some of its power. The suit he wore was closer to being a keyboard/monitor combination. It sent commands to the ringworld grid and acted as a focal point for the output. If Ouroboros ever noticed the connection it could kill Spike in a nanosecond by simply ordering the suit to teleport in a billion different directions at one or set him on fire. Wearing the suit was a risk, but it was a risk he was willing to take.

In the cave was a small generator and a radio transmitter.

"Stormcloud, this is Spike, over." Years ago Spike had began to cultivate connections with the Ringworld natives. A particularly savage warrior had caught his attention. Spike spent years training him and obtaining his loyalty. A static filled voice answered the transmission.

"This is Stormcloud, over."

Spike smiled. "Begin operation 'Chosen-Retrieval.'"

"Yes, my lord." The deep voice said.

It was time he found the other Buffy and made sure she didn't try to kill him. Spike waited for the shadow squares to bring on the night. After dark, he packed his things and made his way to the map of Mars.

Dawn watched her sister return.

Buffy had been gone for weeks. Spike had tried to kill her by firing the Ringworld meteor defense laser at her. Spike had burned several million square miles of land and only managed to piss Buffy off even more.

"I'm still your protector." were Buffy's last words to her.

Dawn watched Buffy coming towards her and noticed something odd about her. There was something alien in the way she walked. Her body language was aggressive and minimalist. She moved like someone with somewhere to go and not enough time to get there. Her hair was shorter, her body was more muscular and as she approached Dawn could see an ugly scar running down the side of her face.

Future-Buffy approached within a few feet of Dawn and stared at her cruelly. She stiffly brought up her arm and shot Dawn once with a tranquilizer gun. Future-Buffy leaned over Dawns prone body.

"Oh." She said. "You're the other one."


	3. Chapter 3

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Spike set up camp at the edge of the great ocean.

He had hiked a considerable ways towards the structure known as the Map-Of –Mars. He could see it clearly on the Ringworld horizon. Map-of-Mars was a one to one recreation of the planet Mars topological features lifted five miles into the atmosphere to simulate the low Martian air pressure. The builders of the Ringworld had built a one to one ratio of all the planets in known Human space.

For the next leg of the journey he world have to fly. The Great Ocean was millions of miles wide. A journey by boat to Map-of-Mars could take months even years.

Spike believed that the Great Ocean was built by the Pak Protectors to simulate interstellar warfare. It stunned Spike the grand scale of it all. You could drop a million troops on the Map-Of-Earth and a million troops on the Map-of-Kzin and a million troops on the Map-of-Mars and run battle simulations in real time for generations. You could document the whole thing from the cameras mounted on the shadow squares. From the records Spike had read, there were primitive humanoids, Homo Habilis, on the Map-Of-Earth. That meant that the Ringworld was at least three million years old. Spike was curious as to why the primitive humans had not evolved. There was no record of predators on the Map-Of-Earth and damn sure no demons.

It was a paradise which was a shame. The Map-of-Earth was crawling with untapped Human potential and no natural selection to spur evolution. The Humans there were stuck because no one had volunteered to be the serpent that drove them out of paradise.

If the PAK Protectors were able to abduct ancient Humans from Earth millions of years ago then where were the Old Ones. Where were the demon lords of ancient Earth? No matter their technology, the PAK could have never defeated the Old Ones without damaging the Earth beyond notice. With his increased intelligence Spike came to the only conclusion possible.

The Old Ones had sold the Humans to the PAK as payment for them keeping silent. This could only mean that the Old Ones know about the Ringworld.

That one though chilled Spike to the bone.

Currently, the huge demons of Earth were prisoners in a place called "The Deeper Well." They slumbered in eternal sleep there. If they were to ever awaken they would need a new world to conquer. The Ringworld would be perfect for them.

Spike hated being smart. It meant that now he could see and understand just how fragile and interconnected everything was. He also hated the nagging consciousness of his new found soul. By drinking Buffy's blood Spike had tapped into a cosmic wellspring of knowledge. It changed him at the cellular level. A cosmic awareness had engrained itself on every cell of his supernaturally animated body. That awareness carried energy that reprogrammed his flesh. He was literally a new man.

He felt like Saul on the road to Damascus. He'd had a born again experience.

The demon inside of him still raged, still wanted to drink the universe but Spike recognized it as something small and selfish. The demon inside of him was still a mindless destroyer but now Spike had the power to compartmentalize it, to not let it define him.

The power to choose made Spike more Man than Monster.

Spike opened a plastic bag of animal blood as he curled up inside of his reflective tent. He would have to hold up here until the shadow squares brought night then he would rendezvous with Stormbringer .

He needed to make it to Map-Of-Mars to launch his war.

The yellow school bus sped down the road.

He watched on the video projection over and over again. The destruction of Sunnydale was well documented. The pentagon had satellites overhead that recorded the whole event. He watched homes, businesses, the entire city collapse into a sink hole and the all the while the yellow school bus kept ahead of the destruction.

When the school bus stopped, at the edge of the destruction, he watched _her_ get out. His finger stabbed the pause button. On the wide screen was the fuzzy and distorted image of Buffy Summers and her band of miscreants. There was no doubt that she had something to do with the destruction of Sunnydale. He examined the image again. He could make out the image of the witch beside her and the British outcast in the back. The boy Xander was there as well. They were surrounded by a bunch of young girls he didn't recognize.

"Now you recognize what we're dealing with. " The general said. His face was covered in shadow. "I believe you've had some experience with this creature, this _slayer_."

"Yes, sir." He said.

"I don't have to explain the seriousness of this situation. First Sunnydale, then the moon!" The General slammed his fist on the metal table. The others in the room agreed with him. The general slid a brown folder over to him. "Your instructions and deep background are inside. Do you accept the assignment?

"Yes,sir" he answered.

"Good, now stand."

The man stood as the general walked over to him and pinned to the collar of his uniform the gold bars of a full commander.

"Congratulations, son." You've earned it." The general shook his hand. The man gave him a crisp salute.

"I won't let you down, sir." Said Commander Riley Finn. He looked at the folder that held his instructions.

It was marked "Twilight."


	4. Chapter 4

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Riley took the elevator to the sublevels of the Pentagon.

The Twilight project was in the fifth sub-basement of the pentagon. That meant that its offices were surrounded by five feet of steel mesh reinforced concrete walls with secured doors that could only be opened with an encrypted key card. Whatever Twilight was it must be dangerous as hell.

It had been a heck of a morning. General Wertmuller had just promoted him to full Commander and he had been given orders to report to a new black opts project called "Twilight." The general and his staff had a full debriefing on the "Initiative." They knew about Riley, they knew about Sunnydale and they knew about Buffy.

The generals wanted the slayers gone.

He didn't blame them.

The generals understood that there were forces in the universe for which they had no defense that could destroy the country and even the world. The proof of this was in the sky. A quarter of a million miles away the moon was wrapped in a halo of its own dust. The Hubble telescope had caught a glimpse of something huge that occupied earth's orbit for a fraction of a second and then it was gone.

The analysts at the NSA, the CIA and even the mercenaries over at Blackwater all insist that the object was a ring, a ring the size of Earth's orbit. It appeared in the skies over Earth almost a year to the day that Sunnydale was destroyed. There had to be a connection.

"**It's not unusual to be loved by anyone…" **

The elevator played a Tom Jones song. Riley wondered how hard it would be to rip the speaker from the wall.

The generals understood power. They understood that whatever you cannot control absolutely will eventually come to test you. The slayers were a wildcard and judging by the billions of tons of lunar dust orbiting the moon they were a force to contend with.

"The problem isn't the slayers." Riley thought to himself. "The problem is magic. Magic is power. If everyone had power all would be chaos."

"**It's not unusual to have fun with anyone."**

He thought of Buffy.

She was everything he'd had ever wanted. She was the perfect woman. She had the stamina to keep up with him, the drive to compete with him and the knowledge of all of the weird things he'd dealt with to embrace him. Her life force was tremendous. There were times he could actually feel his skin hum in her presence. He could feel the warm fire of her soul synchronizing with him whenever they made love. The world became a darker place every time she went away. Only, he wasn't good enough for her. Apparently, she required her men have a little more bad boy in their bad boy bank. Her first love was one of the worst vampires in recorded history. He broke her heart when he went away to start a detective agency in Los Angeles. She'd even slept with hostile 17, a punk ass Billy Idol wannabe named Spike. In the end, he couldn't connect to her the way the others had. In the end, he was just human, he was just a man. He could never satisfy her and that hurt him most of all. All of his pain came from the fact of magic.

"**but when I see you hanging about with anyone…"**

Riley hated the fact of magic. Magic was crazy. Monsters came from magic. Magic permitted a simple girl to resurrect the dead. It enabled demons to drink the blood of the living. It gave children the powers of a god. Magic was messy and lawless. It created a separate class of beings that were in the world but not of it. In a blink of an eye, Riley had made up his mind. He would do whatever it took to destroy all of the magic in the world. Maybe then, regular guys like him would have a chance.

"**It's not unusual to see me cry, oh I wanna' die."**

The elevator doors opened. He had arrived at Twilight.

The Ringworld had stirred up a hell of a lot of dust on both the Earth and the moon.

On Earth, there were things that were sensitive to magic. They could track magic. On a normal day these creatures could sense the smallest presence of magic from miles away.

The appearance of the Ringworld in Earth orbit for even a fraction of a second had the same effect as standing next to a jet engine running at full throttle for a fraction of a second.

It was loud as hell.

One creature in particular, felt the microsecond tug of magic from the sky and decided to investigate. The creature was humanoid and older than the hills. Days passed as it traced the ethereal webs of magic back to its source. Now he was at journey's end. He was at the spot where this new magic originated.

It stood outside of her apartment. It was tall and elegant with a top hat and a cane. The elements of the earth moved with it, agreed with it and obeyed it. Fog came out of the clear night sky and wrapped the apartment in a gray haze.

Willow dropped the cell phone in frustration.

She had been speaking to Giles. His arm was healing nicely but he still had no information on the Gem of Amara, the origins of which was wrapped in mystery. Xander was still in the hospital. Her evil vampire twin had drained some his blood and injured him badly. Buffy had given it to Oz to give to Angel who decided that he was unworthy to wear the ring and destroyed it. She had no clue as to how to recreate the ring.

She was all alone now with the exception of the Buffy-Baby. Rona had gone back to her apartment and the next conference call between the slayers wasn't until the next day.

Spike needed that ring to move against Ouroboros, which was the mind that controlled the Ringworld and its magics.

There was a knock at her door.

Willow wasn't expecting anyone. She grabbed a stake as a precaution. The last time someone knocked at her door this late at night Buffy got her face slashed.

"Who is it?" She asked.

"Open the door Willow." The deep male voice said. Willow found that voice sensuous. She found it arousing and intriguing.

Without a second thought, Willow opened the door and stared at the tall, dark and handsome man before her. He was easily over six feet tall, thin but muscular. He wore formal black slacks, a blood red shirt with a black vest over it. He held a walking cane made out of black mahogany with a shiny silver wolf's head handle.

Willow walked right up to him. She had no fear. Her heart was fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird. She felt as light as a feather and as meek as a lamb. She was lost in the strangers dark penetrating eyes.

"Come to me witch. I want to taste you." He said.

Willow stood on her tip toes as she reached up to kiss him. The strangers kiss was warm. She could feel his power moving through her stirring all her secret places.

Her mind didn't know what to make of what her body was doing. She didn't want to listen to her mind right now. She was enchanted.

"This can't be right." Willow murmured to herself. "I'm gay."

"I'm sure you are" The stranger said to her after he finished the moist kiss.

"Who are you?" Willow asked. The breath had gone out of her.

"I am Count Dracula." He said.


	5. Chapter 5

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Ouroboros watched the distant moon.

The trillions of miles of superconductive mesh embedded in the ringworld formed an excellent sensor net. It was capable of resolving the presence of asteroids in other solar systems half way across the galaxy. It viewed the universe across the entire energy spectrum from near absolute zero to gamma-ray particles energetic enough to create particle pairs of matter and antimatter. Not only could it detect matter and energy it could directly view the curvature of the Universe over a multi-galactic range. Ouroboros would even view and manipulate the tightly curled up spatial dimensions beyond the first three occupied by Humans.

It found the target easily. Fifty light years away, a dirty snowball with a metallic rocky core moved in the frigid space between the planets of its solar system. Ouroboros choose the target because it was structurally the same as its final target. The bulk of it was mostly water.

From Its point of view, the asteroid looked like a fuzzy ball of cotton. Like every object in the universe, it had sub-atomic tendrils that reached down into the microscopic cracks in space-time. Ouroboros knew the great secret of the universe. It knew that everything is connected to everything else. It located the impossibly thin tendrils that stretched to the ringworld across fifty light years and forced a quantum interaction that provoked every particle in the tendril to flip its spin value.

The effects were immediate. Fifty light years away, thirty percent of the matter in a nameless comet turned into antimatter. A brief second star formed in the darkness. Incomprehensible energies poured out into empty space. Ouroboros observed the results and was pleased. The main weapon was now ready. With a slight recalibration, it would soon remove the threat from Earth and the red headed Witch.

Still, Ouroboros felt threatened. The time it would take him to recalibrate the weapon could be sufficient time for the witch to harm him. Ouroboros began to perform a calculation that would flood the Earth with feral creatures specifically designed to kill Willow. These monsters would be a lot livelier than his dead unicorns.

If it had hands it would have rubbed them together and emitted an evil laugh. As it were, the spirit of Vamp- Willow just laughed to herself as she felt the warm sunlight fall on her through the ringworld surface.

In the cold and dark recesses of space other eyes had watched the comet explode. They knew the origins of its demise. They were not pleased. In the way their kind had done for millions of years they began to make their plans.

She was enthralled by the vampire.

His dark beauty and power had captured her full attention. It took Willow a full minute to recognize the name.

"Dracula!" She yelped with great surprise. "Get out!" She said in mock unbelief.

"No, I will not 'get out' Benandanti." Dracula called her by the ancient name of witches that worked to benefit mankind.

Willow placed the stake on a nearby table. She knew it wouldn't matter anyway.

"Why are you here?" Willow asked. She could feel her self control returning. It was nothing she had done. Dracula has decided to ease his hold on her. Willow motioned for him to sit at the dining room table.

"What was it?" He asked. "The power of it was beyond anything I have experienced. What was it _little balaur_?" Dracula used the Romanian word for dragon. "What have you conjured?"

Willow knew he was talking about the Ringworld.

"For the briefest moments I felt the presence of a power that rivaled the Old Ones." Willow could tell that Dracula was impressed. "This _thing _you've made appear contains the power to tear this planet apart. It is a threat to both the living and the dead."

"There is a wheel in the sky." Willow said. "I think it is the source of all of the magic here on Earth. It is the reason we are what we are."

Willow understood why Dracula was here. He had come to offer his assistance. This was hard for Willow to believe but it must be true. Dracula was afraid.

Dracula paused before he spoke again. "Where is the Slayer? I wish to see her." He said.

Willow got up and went into the back room. She returned with the Buffy-Baby after a short while. Willow gingerly placed the Buffy-Baby into Dracula's arms.

"I have a long story to tell you." Willow said. "But first, do you know about the Ring of Amara?"

"Yes I do." He answered.

"Good." Willow said. That answer had taken a load off of her shoulders.

Dracula held the Buffy-baby in his arms. "The slayer is a lot younger than I remembered." He said. Dracula looked at the baby with a far away expression on his face.

"These are strange times we live in." He said to no one in particular.

"What'cha doing?" Dawn asked the woman that was not her sister. She was awake now. The tranquilizer she was shot with from the dart had worn off. Dawn sat up in the horse drawn wagon and looked around at the ringworld landscape that slowly shifted around her. Her caravan was long gone.

"All this technology and we're using a buggy and carriage." Dawn murmured to herself.

The Future-Buffy looked at her blankly without a smile.

"I have something the Monks never thought of." She said. "I have two copies of the Key."

"So?" asked Dawn as she looked over the scars that covered Future-Buffy's body.

"What happened to her?" Dawn thought. "What made her so bitter and dark?" She felt sorry for this woman who was compelled to pull herself through time.

"I'm creating a doomsday weapon." The future-Buffy said flatly.

Dawn inhaled sharply. There were over thirty trillion people on the ringworld.

"This is madness." Dawn thought. "Madness!"


	6. Chapter 6

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

They had been working the magic for hours.

Dracula had revealed to Willow that he had known the original creator of the Ring of Amara. The ring used Romanian gypsy magic to generate a protection spell as a standing wave around the wearer. Dracula used the every bit of knowledge he had of the ring's creation to help recreate it. So far nothing had worked. They were getting frustrated and tired.

Willow moved the embers from the sacred flame to see if anything had materialized. Nothing was there. She blew air between her lips and leaned back. She looked over the mess of burnt crystals, portions and half covered runes that covered her dining room table.

"Any ideas, my lord?" Willow asked. She was really starting to hate the compulsion spell Dracula had placed on her.

The Buffy-Baby looked over at both Willow and Dracula. She made quiet little grunting noises. Her green eyes were wide open. Drool formed at the side of her mouth.

"It eludes me _Benandanti." _Dracula said.

It was hard for Willow to tell how he was feeling. His tone and posture revealed nothing.

"Your memories have proved unreliable.' Willow said venting her frustration. "I don't know what to do."

"You will think of something little dragon." Dracula assured her. "The continuance of the World depends on your magic."

"Yeah, that's me. Old reliable." Willow said sarcastically. "I haven't been called that since…"

Her mind flashed back.

"I haven't been called that since I summoned my evil twin from the wishverse!" she said sardonically. A revelation came over her. "We don't have to recreate the ring! We only have to pick up a copy!"

Willow quickly scurried around the apartment gathering magical ingredients. She placed the blessed sand in a small cup. Willow handed Dracula a sheet of paper and a pencil.

"Draw it, my lord." She said. "The magics need an image of what we're looking for to retrieve it across the multiverse."

Willow waited until Dracula had drawn a highly detailed image of the Gem of Amara. She looked it over. The sketch of the ring was accurate. Dracula was good.

"I'm going to need a second to create a temporal fold. She said to him

Dracula looked at her. His dark eyes did not smile.

"I have witnessed this spell being performed since before your grandparents were born." He said flatly.

"Forgive me my Lord." Willow said. She swore to herself that as soon as this was over she was going to have a long talk with Dracula about the obedience spell he had cast on her.

Willow began to talk more to herself than Dracula.

"I pour the sacred sand on the representation of the object. I'll then call on Eyrishon, the endless one to retrieve the ring from the Wishverse."

Willow began the magics. Dracula opened a portal across the multiverse as she sprinkled the sacred sand across his sketching of the object.

Willow chanted. "Diprecht. Doh-tehenlo Nu-Eyrishon."

Dracula responded. "The child to the Mother."

Willow joined him. "The river to the sea. Eyrishon. Hear my prayer."

The room filled with gold white sparkles of light as the magic filled the room. There was a low sucking sound like something being plucked from thick amber. The lights dissipated. Willow looked down.

The Gem of Amara lay before her.

"I love it when a plan works out." Willow said. She smiled from ear to ear.


	7. Chapter 7

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

He swung the modified Heckler & Koch G3 rifle across his shoulder as he waited for the demon to stir. Grey smoke curled off the long black extended barrel of the modified premium assault rifle. The crowd at the mall had scattered soon after the demon had appeared. His team had intercepted the beast as quickly as possible. Riley Finn kicked the beast with his boot then turned to his second in command.

"Get the cleaners here fast."

Samantha Finn, his wife, executed his orders.

It had been only a few days since his promotion to commander and his assignment to the Twilight project when all hell had broken loose. Reports were coming in from across the world about a new type of demon. The reports describe feral creatures attacking young red headed women. Riley had caught this one at the Washington mall. It had attacked a family of four. The wife had red hair.

Riley kicked it again. The demon was over eight feet tall with greenish red skin and oversized feet and claws.

"What the hell have you summoned, Willow?" Riley thought to himself. His initial reactions were right. There was too much magic in the world. There was too much wild power without a master. People like Willow and Buffy needed to be domesticated before they unleashed something into the world that would kill humanity. Riley thought of the Ringworld that appeared briefly in the sky. It had nearly torn the moon apart as its atmosphere slammed into the Luna surface at seven hundred and seventy miles per second.

The thought of something like Willow being in the world without a leash made her no different in his mind than any number of the demons he had killed over the course of his career.

"Clean up is on the way, sir." His second in command said as she walked up behind him.

"You're so cute when you're obedient." He said to her coyly.

"We'll see who's in charge when we get home tonight, buddy boy." She said back to him with sly smile on her face.

Samantha Finn had been married to Riley for a little over two years. She was a fellow demon hunter. They had met on one of his search and destroy missions to South America. Samantha stood about five foot eleven. She had brunette hair and dark brown eyes and a fit and trim body that had been shaped by years of working in Special Forces.

"What now sir?" Samantha said.

"We go to the source." Riley said. "We need to find out who they've managed to piss off. We need to pay a visit to Willow and clean up the mess she's made. "

His eyes scanned the crowd and the mall space beyond. His face was grim and his eyes here hard.

Riley signaled his troops. 'Let's go." He said.

Dawn watched the back of her sister's head for miles. Her eyes drifted between the back of the Buffy copy's head and the clear blue Ringworld sky. She had a million questions to ask and no way to ask them. Dawn really wanted to know what was going on. The horse drawn wagon creaked as she drew herself up to face this version of her sister.

"I was wondering when you would get up the courage to talk to me." The Buffy copy said casually. Her eyes looked straight ahead.

Dawn choose to voice the one concern that bothered her the most.

"What happened to you Buffy?" she asked. "You look like you've been through hell."

The Buffy copy turned to her briefly and gave her a cold stare. There was an awkward silence before she answered.

"Everything went as planned." The Buffy Copy said. "We were pulled from the school bus right after we closed down Sunnydale. I spent years figuring out the equipment in the lab and fighting with Spike. The monks still had me under a compulsion to protect you. It got so hard. It got so damn hard!" The Buffy copy clinched her hands into a fist. "One day, I just quit. Spike was up to his usual antics and I knew I had to take the Tree-Of-Life fruit and transform into a Protector in order to keep up. I was about to. I was this close. "The Buffy Copy held two fingers close together. "I asked myself why I was doing this. Glory's gone so the Key is not a threat, Sunnydale's gone, Mom's gone, Dad's gone. All of my dreams are dead. I had to drop out of college because I am a slayer. "

The voice of the Buffy Copy was high pitched and strained. "My life has never been mine." She looked at Dawn with hate in her eyes.

"You took my life from me. Mom died because of you." The Buffy Copy said.

They rode on in awkward silence.

Finally, she said "I took the Tree-of-Life for the IQ boost but modified it to keep my reproductive system. The Ringworld is the source of all of the magic in this part of the galaxy. I'm going to neutralize this monster. I'm going to slay the Ringworld. No more demons, no more vampires, no more slayers. Just people free to live their lives."

Dawn understood. If the Buffy copy was successful, Dawn would cease to exist.

The Buffy Copy exhaled harshly before she spoke.

"Even if I have to burn this place to the ground and kill all thirty trillion inhabitants I will be free."


	8. Chapter 8

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Dracula noticed it first.

His supernatural senses noticed that something had changed. He felt a definite shift in the mystic forces surrounding the apartment of Willow Rosenberg. Something sharp and evil had been injected into the world. It felt hostile and alien. He focused his hearing and reached out with his magic to scan the hallway outside the door down to the street below. What he found disturbed him greatly.

"_S__tablo_, the darkness is coming." Dracula said. His tone was even but there was something about the way he said it that Willow found scary and she found that reaction disturbing. What could frighten a master vampire?

"The hand of the outer darkness approaches." Dracula said.

Willow placed the Gem of Amara in her pocket as she went over to the crib and scooped up the Buffy Baby. She had two valuable things to protect. Her mind searched for the proper spell to cast.

"Alien demons approach. Prepare yourself." Dracula said to Willow. His form instantly shifted to mist.

The door exploded. Fragments of wood flew everywhere.

The monster was green and black with spots of raw red muscle tissue showing where there was no skin. It looked like a huge dog that had its skin torn off and stitched back on by a madman. The first one growled as it entered the apartment. The second one appeared a moment later. Their teeth were bared. They were looking for something to kill.

Dracula rematerialized, twisted the top of his cane releasing the latch and pulled out a three foot sword. Willow began to mutter in Latin. Dracula took two steps then launched himself at the first beast. He pivoted into a backwards turn and brought the sword sharply downward.

The creature stood there for a moment staring up at itself before it realized that its head had been cut off. It collapsed to the floor. Its claws scratched at the air looking for something to kill.

The second monster turned its red eyes towards Dracula. It approached him slowly. Dracula held his arm out palm up. He gestured with his fingers.

"Sleep." He said as he began inch to within striking distance of the beast. Dracula's eyes became dark and hypnotic.

The monster didn't care. It snapped out of the spell and lunged at Willow. Willow screamed and turned her back. Her only though was to protect the Buffy Baby.

A boom like thunder rocked the apartment. Six 15mm shells fired from a Steyr AMR 2000 exploded into the back of the head and the body of the demon dog. Entrails and blood splattered the walls and the back and hair of Willow.

Three masked men dressed in black camouflage entered the room. Two of them held crosses and high volume water guns filled with holy water. The third man shouldered the smoking Steyr 2000 and whipped out a small tranquilizer gun.

He shot Willow twice.

Riley removed his mask and surveyed the scene. He knew his men had Dracula in check. He walked over to Willow and tenderly removed the Buffy Baby from her arms before she fully collapsed.

Willow looked up at him in shock and disappointment. She felt betrayed.

"Riley, what are you doing?" She asked as she fell into unconsciousness.

The Gem of Amara had slipped from her pocket. Riley palmed it quickly.

"I'm trying to save the world." He said under his breath.

Dawn watched the Buffy Copy set up camp. After spending hours in the horse drawn buggy they broke for camp near a quiet river. Dawn watched Buffy remove the supplies from the buggy and work the automated machinery that would have the entire encampment set up in minutes.

Dawn had already made up her mind. Thirty trillion, there was thirty trillion people on the Ringworld. Dawn felt sorry for doppelganger but there was no way in hell she was going to let the Buffy Copy put that many lives in danger. She reached into her waistband and pulled out a small knife. There was no way she could take Buffy in prolonged hand to hand combat but she had over two hundred years of battle experience. She hoped she would be good enough to slip in and disable Buffy long enough to tie her up or escape. Dawn slowly crept up behind Buffy careful not to make any noise. Buffy was squatting over a device that would purify the river water carefully making adjustments. Dawn was close enough to touch Buffy's hair. She held the blade tightly between thumb and forefinger. Dawn's left hand slammed into the back of Buffy's head as her right hand drew the blade across the slayer's throat.

Buffy was fast.

As the blade was slicing her throat, the Buffy copy twisted and rammed her elbow into Dawn's ribcage. The blow knocked Dawn backwards. She took the energy the Buffy copy had given her and positioned her body into a classic judo stance. As the Buffy copy rose to attack, Dawn kicked her twice with the heel of her foot breaking her nose. Dawn brought up her right hand with three of her fingers together in the classic cobra strike position. If she was lucky, if she was very, very lucky, she could punch the Buffy copy in the throat crushing her windpipe. But she wasn't.

The Buffy copy recognized the cobra strike position. She stepped in and bashed Dawn across the face with knocking her to the ground. Dawn looked up at her sister. There was a blackness at the edge of her vision.

The Buffy copy asked "What are you doing, Dawn?"

"I'm trying to be like you Buffy; I'm trying to save the world." She said.

The Buffy copy retrieved the blade from the ground. It had flecks of her blood on it. "Damn, you've gotten bloodthirsty in your old age. "She thought.

Spike watched the Map-of-Mars blossom before him. His second in command, a native called Stormbringer had met him with a hypersonic flyer. It was a small cargo ship capable of suborbital flight. Even at a speed of over four thousand miles per hour it took nearly three days to reach his destination.

Stormbringer was over seven feet of muscle and brawn. He had a dark trim goatee he decorated with the finger bones of his enemies. Spike found him as a boy starving to death in some nameless village. He had a viciousness Spike admired.

The Map-of Mars expanded into view as they cleared the clouds. Stormbringer drove the ship straight down at well over a thousand miles per hour. If it was not a indestructible General Products hull it would have melted a long time ago. The landscape of the Map-Of-Mars was blacked and melted around the edges from where Spike had unleashed a nuclear firestorm.

The ship pivoted sickenly at nearly a right angle as it entered the main access hanger. Stormbringer eased back on the controls using the lateral jets to dock the ship on a nearly empty landing field the size of several hundred football fields. From the exit ramp, Spike greedily eyed the miles of high tech equipment left behind by the Buffy-Protector.

"Forbidden Planet my ass!" He thought to himself as he ran attack senerios in his head. Thanks to the Tree of Life fruit he was now several hundred times smarter than he was on Earth. He knew he could do this.

This world he had been called to had disturbed his life. Ouroboros had killed the woman he loved. Spike knew it was time to end all of this. It was time to start his war against the Ringworld.


	9. Chapter 9

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Willow watched him from behind a inch thick window of plexiglass. She paced back and forth inside of her ten by twelve foot metal cell. For the last six hours she had argued with Riley over the value of magic and the monstrous thing known as the Ringworld. Riley had accused her and Buffy of being reckless, of endangering the Human race with their wild forays into the unknown. Riley accused her of being a threat to the world.

"Try to blow up the world once and people never let you forget." Willow thought in response to Riley's accusations.

"May I also remind you that it was Buffy's inexperience that unleashed Angelus, resulting in the death of Ms. Calendar? Riley said never taking his eyes off the classified report he was reading.

He was right. She and Buffy had made terrible mistakes. Willow thought of all the things they had experienced over the last seven years. She thought about number of times she and Buffy had saved the world and number of times they had wounded each other. The sheer scale of it left her awed. Now she was here, trapped in a box by someone she trusted on trial for what could be considered crimes against Humanity under different circumstances. The more she thought about it the more she oscillated between feelings of outrage and despair.

"We were kids then, none of us knew what we were doing. You were there; you know, we were running a thousand miles an hour trying to save the world. We were young and goofy, but our hearts were in the right place. If we screwed up it's because we didn't know any better. We're not malevolent. Buffy and I are not the evil thing in the dark."

She pressed her face against the magic proof window and spoke to urgently to Riley.

"Listen to me, something is coming! The Slayers have seen it! The world will be incinerated by a machine that thinks it's a God. Riley, we don't have time for this!" She yelled into the intercom.

Riley turned the volume down on the intercom as he continued reading. Riley read to the end of the current page and then looked up at Willow for a long moment. She had never recalled seeing his eyes this hard. Riley waited a moment then returned the volume of the intercom back its normal level.

"Tell me about this Ringworld, and where is Buffy and what's the deal with the baby?" Riley asked.

"The baby is Buffy. The Ringworld, it breaks magic. She's going to have to grow up all over again unless I can fix this."

"This is exactly what I mean." Riley said. "Magic is the problem."

"No, it's not!" Willow said back to him. "The problem is that the magic is in the hands of a jerk who wants to kill us all. Think of magic like politics. At its best, it can give us something like the Apollo space program or the civil rights act. At its worst, it can give us the Nazi party. Magic is Power and the quality of the use of power depends on the character of the user. If you do this Riley, if you take away the magic you will leave humanity defenseless against all of evil in the universe. "

Riley stood. He turned off the monitoring devices that allowed his superiors to monitor the interrogation. He walked over the Willow. He hurried; he knew someone would be here soon to check on them.

Riley swiped his key card opening the door to Willows cage. Her cell door opened.

"I know." He said in whispered tones to her. "The people I work for must be stopped." Riley fished around in his pocket and pulled out the Gem of Amara.

"The question is, how do we get this to Spike? He said.

The air in the back of Riley shimmered then condensed into the form of Dracula. His dead eyes looked at Riley without emotion. Willow caught sight of Dracula and motioned him to remain still.

"I thought you were with them?" Willow asked. "Why must Twilight be stopped?"

Riley swallowed before he continued. "I saw the video of what they're planning to do. They discovered a set of spells that could effectively turn off magic over a small area. I saw the video file of what happened the first time they field tested that spell. Riley swallowed again. "The sorcerer they got to perform it got it to work then seconds later started to bleed out of every hole in his body. He was dead before he hit the floor. "

Dracula tilted his head slightly as if he was remembering something he had pushed from his mind a long time ago, something the gypsies had told him hundreds of years ago when they had imbued him with their magics.

"Life, Willow." Riley said. "Life itself is based on magic. If they cancel magic, they'll kill us all."

Spike watched the sun.

He observed the ultra high resolution holographic image of the Ringworld's star that floated above his work desk. He could see in it the whorls and eddies of superheated hydrogen plasma. As the image of the star rotated he could see solar flares as ribbons of gas heated to thousands of degrees.

He had a simple plan.

Ouroboros was basically software. If he could introduce a strong enough current into the Ringworld superconductor mesh he could disrupt the electromagnetic data storm that was the mind of the Ringworld. He would use the sun like the bulk tape erasers of old.

There was only one problem. Thirty trillion people would be killed in the process. Spike did the calculations in his head over and over again. Even if he was off by several orders of magnitudes, trillions would still die from radiation poisoning.

He was no Louis Wu. He couldn't commit genocide to save the world. The soul he wore in his flesh wouldn't let him.

"If only I could find a way to get rid of the people for just a little while." Spike said to himself.

"I know what you mean." A voice said from behind him. "The world would be a perfect place if it wasn't for all of the people in it."

Spike turned and was shocked. He jumped to his feet not knowing whether to flee or fight.

"What's the matter? You act like you've seen a ghost?" She said as she walked out of the darkness to stand before him. Spike was still shocked. Buffy had told him about her but to see her with his own eyes left him saddened and angry.

"You don't have the right to wear her face, besides aren't you dead?" He asked her.

"Aren't we all?" answered Vamp Willow.


	10. Chapter 10

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Dracula tore into the guards like a fierce animal. He ripped a chunk of throat from the first guard while he twisted the arm of the other guard and pulled it from its socket. Dracula growled and emitted a noise that made even Riley's battle hardened hair stand on end. The dark prince dug his fingernails into the flesh of another guard directly under the jawbone and then tore his face off. He was savage. Willow could feel the violent energy he radiated and it scared her.

"Vampires are not our friends." She thought to herself as she hid behind Riley.

Dracula looked past her. His eyes were red and bloodshot. They were the color of burning blood. Dracula stood down the squad of soldiers sent to execute Willow. His sword-cane was covered with blood. The floor and walls were covered with entrails and Willow could swear she heard Dracula laughing as men begged for their lives.

"The 'Twilight' movies have lied to millions. Vampires are primal creatures." Willow began to understand the horrific danger Buffy had put herself in by falling in love with Angel.

"I will get the child." Dracula said in a tone Riley recognized immediately. It was the tone of command. Dracula's skin was white. His mouth was covered in blood. Willow gave up the idea of questioning his decision to retrieve the Buffy-Baby.

"Go _Benandanti._" He said. "I will allow no harm to come to the slayer. She is like…family."

Willow understood what Dracula was saying. She tapped Riley on the arm.

"Time to go." She said.

Spike watched Vamp-Willow circle his desk. He had heard about her from demon gossip. She was a vampire from another universe. She was vicious and _ambitious__._ The Vamp-Willow wore a simple black leather corset trimmed in red with black leather pants. Her eyes were yellow and her mouth wore a cruel smile.

"What do you want?" Spike asked the monster before him.

Vamp-Willow casually looked over Spikes plans to kill Ouroboros. She noticed the equations and the high resolution scans of the ringworld's embedded superconductive mesh. Vamp-Willow ran the equations through her head several times making changes to key variables on the fly.

She was quite the bit smarter than her Earth version.

Her eyes came across something Spike had scribbled in the margins of a paper he was writing.

"_Golden Hair. Morning Smile._

_Ray of light, warmth._

_She is life_

_Her arms open wide."_

The Vamp-Willow smiled.

"William, this is some bloody-awful poetry." She said in a tone sharp enough to slice the air between them as well as Spike's feelings.

"Why are you here?" Spike asked ignoring her comments.

Vamp-Willow looked at him blankly.

"I am not your enemy." She said.

Spike flinched. "Ouroboros?"

Vamp-Willow rolled her eyes.

"No, it's me." She said. "But, I've changed. I have a soul now."

Spike almost laughed. "What, are they handing those things out on every street corner now?" Spike moved slowly around his desk making sure to keep the creature out of striking range.

"Willow merged me with a taste of her own soul. Ouroboros did the calculations necessary to bind me to it. The Ringworld has a soul now but I still remember being me. I come and go as I please. "

Spike thought about what the Vamp-Willow had said. He knew the computational capacity of the Ringworld superconductive mesh.

"How many?" Spike asked. "How many do you represent?"

"Legion." Vamp-Willow answered flatly. "There are many that share the mesh that disagree with the path Ouroboros has chosen. "

"Thrones and Dominions, eh?" Spike said referencing the hierarchy of angels.

"I'm here to make a deal." Vamp-Willow said. "I've analyzed your plans. They won't work unless you're planning to kill thirty trillion people. We need a way to move them out of the way when you cause the sun to flair. I may be able to help you there. "

Spike didn't believe her. She must know that his plans would wipe _all_ the software from the ringworld superconductive mesh not just Ouroboros.

"Are you that eager to die?" Spike asked.

"Silly, blood rat." She said with contempt. "What makes you think we only occupy three spacial dimensions and one arrow of time? We're software that can manipulate your reality at the quantum mechanical level. We cannot die or be destroyed, ever."

Vamp-Willow looked at Spike in a way far colder than any demon he had ever encountered.

"What you need to worry about is who will occupy the throne after Ouroboros is removed."

Vamp-Willow snapped her fingers and disappeared in a spasm of fire that nearly burned every paper on Spikes desk.

Spike returned to his desk and looked at his scorched papers. His poem has been burned to a crisp. He noticed the modifications to the equations done by Vamp-Willow. He studied them for hours before he understood their true ramifications. That was when he poured himself a pint of Zebra blood, from the Map-Of-Earth, with a generous shot of whiskey.

"It's ain't easy being me." He said to himself.

Later, hours later, Spike walked along the balcony platform of his command center. In order to make the Map-Of-Mars work, the Pak Protectors had lifted the ringworld floor several miles into the sky. Spike stood on his balcony and watched the checkered board pattern of the Ringworld arch as it curved upward and overhead to disappear into infinity. He placed his hands on the balcony railing careful not to venture out into the direct rays of the Ringworld sun. His hands were scarred and he still had places on his face that were burned when he had accidently unleashed a nuclear holocaust. He thought about his life and unlife. He was amazed that he had come as far in the world as he had even if his poetry was bloody awful. Spike laughed at it all. That's when he vowed never to feel sorry for himself and to fight the good fight.


	11. Chapter 11

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

She could see the arch of the Ringworld from where she stood. The copy of Buffy Summers entered a clearing at the edge of the woods. She looked skyward a moment taking in the checker board pattern of the Ringworld that lay millions of miles away. It was night where she was standing. The shadow squares cast patterns of light and dark over lands distant and greater than all of the kingdoms of Earth.

She was at the shore of the great ocean. Before her, lay tens of millions of miles of water. The ringworld engineers had sculpted the ringworld floor to hold the great ocean and at the same time had sculpted the topology of the basin to mirror all the worlds in known space. The scale of it was awesome. In the great ocean were islands the size of planets. She could see at the very edge of her vision ships that were larger than the empire state building on Earth. She knew, as a fact, that there were ships, actually floating cities, currently in the great ocean where millions of people lived their whole lives.

Both Dawns joined her by the edge of the sea.

Days ago she retrieved the second Dawn. This was the Dawn that had been copied with her to the Ringworld so many years ago. If the Buffy Protector had not screwed up the transfer of her and Dawn from Sunnydale to the Ringworld she would not be here. She world have made all of the same choices that would lead to the creation of the Buffy Protector and the timeline would have not been fractured, but it was. The Buffy Copy that stood at the edge of the great ocean was an unforeseen thing, an unintended consequence of someone else's actions.

"First the dark men call me to be a slayer, then the monks call me to be a sister, then the Ringworld calls me to be a protector. When will my life be my own?" The Buffy Copy thought. She stood silently with her arms crossed starring into the gray mists of the great ocean.

"I'm pretty." Dawn said to herself as she looked her quantum copy up and down. The Dawn from the Buffy Protector smiled at the Dawn that had been transferred with the Buffy copy.

"Why are you still here?" The Dawn Copy asked the Buffy Protector Dawn.

"Magic." She answered. "I was created by a realty augmentation spell. When the timeline was changed, the spell didn't notice. It went blindly along its way anchoring this construct to this reality. The realty augmentation spell is pretty stupid. The Buffy Protector began to suspect this when I was reconstituted after being pulled into a black hole while using my keyness to search the past for the original Buffy."

The Buffy copy could hear their conversation. She briefly looked over her shoulder at them and growled.

"She's cute when she's homicidal." The Dawn copy said and then thought for a moment. "Hey, I'm my own homing beacon!" She said, just getting the implications of what the Buffy Protector Dawn had said.

"And that's not the weird part." The Buffy Protector Dawn said. The Dawn copy looked at her puzzled. "What would you get if you blew up the universe?" The Buffy Protector Dawn asked the Dawn Copy.

"What?" she replied.

"You and I floating through the infinite void forever." The Buffy Protector Dawn said. "As near as the Buffy Protector and I could figure the monks never installed an off switch. There is the possibility that we could live forever. An immortal with the ability to reproduce is not a good thing. Buffy and I did the math one night. I could replace the entire thirty trillion person population of the ringworld all by myself in about four hundred generations. Of course, poor Acke would be all worn out by then, but you get the picture."

"Got any baby pictures?" The Dawn copy asked.

"Sure do." The Buffy Protector Dawn answered as she pulled an image viewer from her stash.

"Will you two old ladies keep it down?" The Buffy copy asked.

"Are we making it hard for you to concentrate on your evil plan to destroy the world?" The Dawn copy asked with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

"So that's your big plan? You're going to get magic to bite itself in the ass, to shoot itself in the foot? Help me." The Buffy Protector Dawn said. "I'm running out of metaphors."

"I'm going to get magic to cancel itself out" The Buffy copy said. "I'm going to make the two sets of augmentation spells notice each other. I'm going to make them fight for supremacy draining all the magic in the process. If I do this right, there'll be no more vampires, no more slayers, no more hell gods, and no more magic." The Buffy Copy looked at Dawn. "And no more you."

"What gives you the right to change the world?" The Dawn copy asked her sister.

"Such decisions have always been mine. I do what's necessary." The Buffy copy said. "I am the dark command."

The Buffy copy removed the branches that covered the general products hull and entered the hidden ship. It was a small suborbital craft just big enough for three people. The Buffy copy fired up the engines as she readied for the twenty hour trip to the Map-Of-Mars. Her ship could do a fair fraction of the speed of light.

"Let's go, everybody in." The Buffy Copy said.

"Should we tell her?" The Dawn Copy thought to herself.

"Not yet, it will be fun to see how far she goes with this." The Buffy Protector Dawn thought to herself. "Let's see if she's smart enough to figure out that she has it all wrong.

The two Dawns continued to talk among themselves telepathically as they silently entered the ship.

**Algebraic topology**

Think of Dawn as a 5 dimensional octopus sending 3 dimensional tendrils into this universe.


	12. Chapter 12

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The kiddy prison was at the end of a long hallway that ended in a tee shape with administrative offices on one arm and a prep room for soldiers on the other. The Buffy-Baby resided in a twenty by thirty foot playroom complete with cartoon drawings of white clouds, blue elephants, a bright rainbow and two well armed guards that stood in opposite corners silently watching the Buffy-Baby for hours on end. Periodically, a male nurse from Special Forces would come in to change her diapers and play with her.

They wouldn't start experimenting on the Buffy-Baby for a while yet. Still, the nurse knew they would have the Buffy-Baby completely dissected by tomorrow evening which was too bad. She was such a cutie pie. The Buffy -Baby had a way of looking at him with a sweet innocence. Her green eyes were clear. Her skin was soft and pink.

As medical Sergeant Komen made entries into his notebook he noticed a strange fog seeping in from the ventilation grill. The fog thickened as it poured down the wall of the cell. It moved like a living being. The fog _hesitated_ a moment as it began to build itself into the form of a man. Sergeant Komen knew that was wrong for so many reasons chief among them was the fact that the Twilight project used a completely enclosed ventilation system cut off completely from the outside air. Whatever this fog was, it had originated from inside the Twilight complex.

He hit the panic button on his wrist then unsheathed his sidearm.

The soldiers near the door took their guns off safety and locked the door to the room as they hit the alarm. Sirens blared in the background. In the prep room soldiers scrambled. The fog growled at them and then charged.

Dracula _phased_ into human form a split second before he slammed into the first guard. Blood splattered the main door as he turned and drank the second guard dry. Sergeant Komen emptied a full clip into Dracula before the vampire could turn. He didn't want to think about how dead he already was.

"Bring the child to me." Dracula said calmly.

Komen holstered his .45 semiautomatic then calmly turned to obey. He had the Buffy-Baby in Dracula's arms in mere moments. Komen looked past Dracula to the dead soldiers by the main door. He had no thought of them. The Buffy-Baby looked up at Dracula and frowned. She was sleepy and grumpy and didn't appreciate all the noisy bloodshed.

The main door exploded inward. The soldiers had blown it open with a handful of C4. Shrapnel slammed into the back of Dracula irritating him greatly. Komen was knocked to the floor. The Buffy-Baby began to cry. Dracula could see pieces of shrapnel too small for the Human eye to see whiz millimeters from the Buffy-Baby's face.

"They dare threaten her?" He thought to himself. His anger flared as hot as the sun. It was a flame that consumed his reason. Dracula tucked the Buffy-Baby close to him. He turned to face the soldiers as they rushed through the burning door.

Before he could move, a soldier shot him in the shoulder with a powerful shotgun blast. Globs of undead flesh and blood hung in the air for brief moments before the gypsy magic filling Dracula reassembled him. His sword appeared in his hand. Dracula lunged forward and decapitated the soldier with one clean stroke. Before his head could hit the ground, he turned and swiped his sword across the throats of three others. Their screams were cut short.

There were only a handful of soldiers left. With the Buffy-Baby tucked securely, Dracula took the fist of his free hand and punched the solders' heart out through his ribcage. He relaxed his magic and turned only a part of himself to mist and allowed himself to be deeply inhaled. When Dracula was sure that he was deep into the soldier's lungs he materialized himself. The soldier's chest exploded outward in a bloody shower. Sergeant Komen gained consciousness. He fumbled for the silver crucifix he had in his pocket and the water balloon filled with holy water. Komen struggled to his feet as he threw the water balloon hitting Dracula square in the chest. White smoke billowed off of the Prince of the Undead as he began to burn. Only his seething anger kept him from rolling his eyes. Dracula killed him last.

Three flash grenades were shot into the room and exploded with the clap of God's own thunder. The Buffy-Baby screamed. Her voice was high and piercing. She gave into her fear without limit. She vibrated with the energy of her screams. Quantum strings vibrated in time with her urgency.

Hundreds of light years away Ouroboros was alerted to her fear. A fraction of a second before he obviated the Twilight base Ouroboros locked onto the magics surrounding Dracula and Buffy-baby and pulled them out.


	13. Chapter 13

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The war was going well. Spike had all the machinery he needed to cause the Ringworld sun to flair in a special way. Now, he was in his command chair staring up into a ring of high definition monitors, each the size of a football field. Each monitor showed a slice of the huge Ringworld surface. His throne was gimble mounted and could rotate a full three hundred and sixty degrees in seconds. The images on the huge monitors could be endlessly changed and reformatted. They fed off of the data stream directly from the cameras mounted on the shadow squares. He had removed the Buffy Protectors time delay on the cameras days ago. Now he enjoyed a real time view of the Ringworld surface. At the current resolution of the cameras, white clouds appear to cling to the land like balls of cotton. Spike pressed a button. His point of view dove downward at a sickening speed. If he was Human he would have puked.

The other machines were ready. Spike had altered the Ringworld meteor defense system. Instead of forcing a solar flare to lase into the x-ray region, it now forced the entire sun to nova. The electrically charged solar corona would wipe the Ringworld superconductor grid clean of any parasitic software. He basically had a gun against Ouroboros's head. There was only one problem.

Thirteen trillion people would die in the process.

Spike repeated the mantra spoken by every engineering student over and over in his head

"Calculus is my friend, calculus is my friend." The Mantra didn't help. He still hadn't figured out a way to avoid creating an apocalypse on such a scale that even the demons would cringe.

"Calculus is nobody's friend. Those equations want to kill you." He heard her say from behind.

Spike didn't need to look behind him. He recognized the voice. He could feel her presence humming beneath his skin. He could smell her.

"Damn, doesn't anybody stay dead in this place?" Spike asked rhetorically. He turned to stare at Buffy. She had two other women with her.

Spike looked the other two women up and down. They could pass for identical twins, better than identical twins. Spike was a vampire. His vision was better than most. The two women with Buffy were _exactly_ alike. And something else, there was a connection between them that went beyond the flesh. Spike knew instantly that the two women with Buffy were not human. He could easily see the arc of green energy that flowed between them.

"I have got to get better security." He said.

The Buffy copy had been observing Spike for days. Her plan to use the Key to cancel out magic took a back seat to what the Spike Protector had built. His doomsday machine was much cooler. When she had figured it all out she came out of hiding. Spike's doomsday machine had one major flaw. It was Spike himself. Soul boy would never willingly kill thirteen trillion people. She could. It was necessary for her happiness. She always had the ability to make the hard choices. Spike's guards were easily dispatched. She crept up behind him as quietly as possible. She saw the equations on the screen and smiled to herself. She found it funny that Spike was doing homework.

Buffy ignored him as she worked through the implications of annihilating Ouroboros.

"Ouroboros is not the source of the magic. It simply uses quantum entanglement to its own end." Buffy said. She looked at him. Her eyes were dark, vacant and haunting empty. Spike wondered what sort of hell she had been through. He could tell. This was not the woman he fell in love with. This was a bad copy of her.

Buffy seemed to read his thoughts. "No, I'm not her." She said. "I'm not the other Buffy." She smiled as she gestured towards her sister. "And they are Dawn."

Spike understood. Buffy was not here to kill him. She had plans of her own.

They heard footsteps in the darkness out beyond the circle of light centered on Spike's command chair. They both tensed. Buffy was expecting more of Spike's guards to come rushing to his rescue. Her jaw dropped as a young woman emerged from the darkness. She wore the dead face of Willow Rosenberg.

Buffy remembered. This was the Vamp Willow from the wishverse. Buffy pulled her scythe out and held it ready for battle.

"I could kill you from here." Vamp Willow said casually. "Don't try it."

The two Dawns smirked. Vamp Willow turned her attention towards Spike.

"Ready?" She asked. Spike nodded to her as he slowly turned back to his control panel. He ran his fingers over a series of buttons. Miles away hellish amounts of energy poured into huge blocks of machinery buried beneath the Map-Of-Mars. The artificial wormhole first created by the Buffy Protector was slowly starting to reopen.

"It's time to get the Gem of Amara from Willow." Vamp Willow said to Spike. It was completely ignoring Buffy.

"I've examined the magics surrounding the Earth. The Gem of Amara has been recreated. It's time to extract it from the time stream." Vamp Willow said.

Buffy couldn't believe what she was hearing. Apparently, this version of Vamp Willow was quite a bit smarter than her Earth version.

"I…" Vamp Willow was about to speak when her eyes went wide. She grabbed her chest and stumbled backwards.

"Ouroboros is coming!!" Vamp Willow eyes went blood red. Her skin began to crack. From distant dimensions, from a nameless place that sat at the center of all worlds a boiling storm like a black cloud laced with lightening began to turn its attention to where Spike was standing.

Vamp Willow lay on the floor withering in pain. Huge chunks of her skin were peeling off of her. The floor was slippery with her blood and mucus.

"The ring, Spike. If you don't get that ring right now we're all dead!"

Buffy could hear the bones of Vamp Willow breaking inside of her body. The doomed creature let out one long sorrowful shriek as invisible hands grabbed it and tore it apart. Chunks of flesh and blood showered the island sized room.


	14. Chapter 14

The Ringworld is the property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

They made it back before Dawn.

Willow and Riley had returned to her apartment. They were in the process of changing clothing when a news report caught their attention. A nearby office park had been destroyed in what looked like a terrorist attack. The building on the television looked familiar.

"We were just there!" Willow said. She had finished her shower finally getting the chunks of demon dog out of her hair. She was sitting near the kitchen table in a white bathrobe. Her place was a mess. There was still blood on the floor from last night.

"I'm never getting my deposit back." Willow thought as she dried her hair.

"Well at least all of the unicorns are gone." On their way back to her apartment, Willow had noticed that the piles of dead unicorns in front of her building were gone. She didn't know if the city had come and collected them or they had simply evaporated. The missing unicorns got her thinking.

"This whole mess is Ouroboros's fault." Willow thought. The dominant mind that occupied the Ringworld superconductor grid had searched for a way to bind a human soul to its mechanical structure. Every time it failed, a stack of dead unicorns appeared. In the process it broke the rules of magic. Willow thought of ways to fix the situation. Magic was broken, Buffy was a baby and Twilight was on their ass. She needed a one fix solution that would solve all of her problems at once.

She needed a way to reboot magic. That way she could get Buffy back and show Twilight that magic and magic users were not the problem.

"How do you reboot magic?" Willow thought. She sat back down at the kitchen table overcome with despair.

Riley Finn came out of the shower. He wore a thick white towel around his waist. His skin was still moist. His hard, toned chest muscles rippled beneath his soft warm pink skin. Willow smiled to herself.

"First Dracula, now him." She thought. "For a gay woman, I'm getting a lot of guy action."

"I've got to decide what to do next. " Riley said as he ran another towel over his wet hair. "I've got to think of a way to infiltrate back into Twilight and contact Samantha. She must be crazy with worry by now." Riley walked over to Willow and placed the Gem of Amara on the table before her.

"I think you need this." He said to her. Riley smiled at her briefly. "Sorry for last night. Just doing my job sounds lame, but…"

"All is forgiven." Willow said as she picked up the ring and held it in her hand. "Speaking of half naked, I think Xander left some clothing in the bed room."

"Oh." Riley said suddenly self conscious. "I'll see what I can find." He said as he made his way to the bedroom.

Willow concentrated on the Gem of Amara. White and gold light sparkled off the emerald at its center. That got her thinking. White light entered the emerald and was broken down into its component elements. The Gem, like any prism, extracted the primary colors from background light. Willow wondered if the effect stopped at light. She knew crystals were routinely used in spell casting. Did the prism effect of crystals extend to magic as well? She knew she was on to something. She concentrated on the crystal letting it draw her in. She made the connection. Her mind had what it was looking for.

The room began to shake.

"It's always something …" Willow thought as she stood. She realized she was still in her bathrobe. She closed her bathrobe and wrapped it tightly. She had forgotten to put on underwear.

The air in the room shimmered as the walls vibrated at a frequency that could only be heard by atoms. White fog came out of nowhere and pooled in the center of the room. Everything got cold, cold and still. A spot at the center of the room no wider than the width of a human blood cell, was dragged down towards absolute zero. In that sacred spot, the wavelength of atoms grew longer and longer. For a length of time that could only be measured by its uncertainty the temperature dropped to exactly absolute zero. The wavelength of atoms there became infinite. _Something_ arced between Willow's apartment and Twilight.

The explosion was white light and snow. The windows to the apartment were blown outward. The walls cracked as every car alarm in a ten mile radius activated. Willow's ears rang for the longest. Smoke rolled off the back of something hunched over in the center of her living room.

Dracula unfurled his cape as he stood to full height. His eyes were blood red, his skin was chalk white. There flecks of human skin and blood on his shirt. The Buffy Baby was curled safely in his arms. She looked sleepy.

"What is he doing here?!" Dracula asked Willow. For a moment she thought he was talking about Riley until she followed his gaze and saw the flickering image of Spike behind her.

"Times up red. I need the Gem, now!" Spike said. Willow could see Buffy standing in the background near him and two Dawns. She didn't need to be told twice. Splattered on the console behind Spike was something bloody and wet. Someone had just died there. Willow could hear something horrible screeching in the background. She could hear equipment being destroyed.

"Now Willow!, Now! Toss the damn bloody ring!" Spike was near panic.

She didn't hesitate. Willow flicked the Gem of Amara through the portal. Spike caught it in mid air and slipped it on his finger. Her eyes turned to Buffy. She could see the scars on Buffy's face. Buffy looked tired and worn down. Buffy caught Willow's eye for a brief moment as an understanding passed between them. The Buffy on the Ringworld would never return to Earth. Willow could tell that she didn't really didn't want to be alive at all. The portal closed between them cutting them off.

Dracula had moved in close to Willow and handed the Buffy Baby off to her.

"Spike." Dracula muttered. "Is he still telling people I owe him money?"

He reviewed the wreckage of the Twilight field office with amusement and disgust. They tried to hold both the count and the slayer here. He was surprised that the body count was not higher. He hit the track mouse with the palm of his hand forcing the display to zoom in on the burning wreckage of the kiddy prison where they held the slayer. He played the video file with the sound at full blast. He wanted to hear every scream and the sound of every voice spoken. Near the end both Dracula and the Buffy Baby disappeared in a flash of light and fire. Three foot concrete bunkers had been shattered into rubble. He tapped the screen controls and froze the image of the burning and wrecked room.

Angel leaned back in his chair and exhaled as a way to show his frustration. What was the Slayer up to?


	15. Chapter 15

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

"You're a good man Spike. You can't do it, but I can. I remember something I told Xander, when I knew it was time to kill Anya. "I told him that the Slayer is alone, that I am the law. I always have to make the tough decisions." Buffy pressed the button. A surface area equal to three hundred million times the surface of the earth lit up as trillion upon trillions of people were translated into energy and absorbed into the Ringworld superconductive mesh. But that was not enough.

People are more than just flesh and blood. They are also soul and sprit. The energies of Dawn wrapped around the Ringworld much faster than the speed of light. She opened herself up to them. The magic that bonded Buffy's soul to Dawn became voracious in its appetite. It leapt across the Ringworld gathering up trillions of souls and sending them back to her. Dawn began to glow. Gold light flowered outward from under her skin. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She was caught up in the ecstasy of consumption.

An angry ball of light that was Ouroboros struck at Spike to no effect. The Gem of Amara protected him. Spike pressed a button and lit up the sun. Electric currents flowed into the Ringworld grid erasing the god of the Ringworld.

Spike tweaked the energies of the sun. Equipment rattled in the room. Ouroboros was still trying to kill him. Spike had to be careful, very careful. The energies of the sun had be to tuned to only effect Ouroboros and leave the stored data patterns of trillions of people unmolested.

When Spike was sure that the trillions of souls were safely aboard Dawn. He cranked up the sun and watched the Ringworld burn.

Later, much later, after they had rebuilt the ecosystem and made sure life would flourish there they reconstituted the digitized bodies of the Ringworld inhabitants. As they did that, they slowly released the captured souls out of Dawn and through magic reintegrated them into the newly formed bodies.

"Death and resurrection." Spike was heard to say to himself. He was witness to and participant in a one of the most profound acts of creation in the galaxy. He felt like a small god himself.

He would often join Buffy at the entrance to the room that held the two Dawns. He still couldn't get over the view. In a cavern, miles across, two golden suns floated in the middle. Their light illuminated the cubic miles of space. Out of them came a steady stream of golden filaments which were souls returning to their rightful bodies. It took months for them all to be discharged.

When it was done the Dawns lay pale, sweaty and glassy eyed. They were near death.

"You take one. I'll take the other." Buffy told Spike.

After the first suicide attempt, Buffy and Spike took turns watching them. One of the Dawns had not said a thing. She had simply taken a scalpel from the medical center and ran it across her wrist. Buffy got to her in time.

"It's something like postpartum depression." Buffy held her sisters cheek as she slept. The Dawns were mother to trillions of souls. She was connected to them. She could feel all of them. Now she's empty. She has to remember how to be just one person."

They watched the Ringworld return to normal. It took years. From the command center Spike could see huge whorls of white clouds. Buffy sat shotgun at the station next to his. The years had brightened her disposition some. She actually smiled now.

Buffy monitored the data flow in the superconductive grid. After Ouroboros, there was just background noise in the superconductive network. That had begun to change. Ouroboros was a natural phenomenon. In time, another intelligence would be created, grow and take his place. Buffy pointed out the hot spots on the data screen to Spike. Silently, they agreed to proceed to the next step. They needed someone to sit on the Ringworld throne and rule it with love. Spike pressed a series of buttons opening up the Buffy Protector wormhole.

Willow was happy with her little girl. She had just fed the Buffy baby and put her to sleep. She would have a long talk with her landlord in the morning. Willow smiled to herself as she watched the Buffy Baby sleep.

A portal opened on the other side of the crib. The space there melted and dissolved into the image of Buffy Summers. She wore a one piece black jumpsuit made out of Ringworld superconductive mesh. Her eyes looked kinder than the last time Willow saw her.

"Did it work?" Willow asked.

"Yes." Buffy answered. "Ouroboros is gone. But we're still cleaning up the mess. "Buffy looked at Willow for a long moment. I think I can live here." She said. "I think I can be happy here."

"I'm glad." Willow said.

"We need one last thing to finish it." Buffy stepped out of the portal and picked herself up out of the crib. Buffy smiled at the baby which was herself.

"This should take just a moment." She said to Willow as she disappeared back into the portal.

Buffy crossed the space from the portal to the disintegrator. The Buffy baby was awake. She squeezed one of Buffy's fingers hard.

"You're strong." Buffy said. "I'll bet mini me is still a slayer."

Buffy placed the child in the metal dish. She looked at Spike and gave the hardest command of her life.

"Do it." She said.

Spike pressed a button. The child was vaporized is a flash of light. Buffy returned to her workstation. What she was looking for didn't show up for weeks. When she saw that something, that some type of data singularity, had formed in the superconductive network she found that she could breathe again. She cried out of sheer joy.

It took them years to raise the child. The mind of the Buffy baby had grown to fruition inside the superconductive mesh. Two days ago it made the waterfall condensate that ran off the edges of the Map-Of Mars flow uphill just for fun. It was testing its powers.

The mind of the Buffy baby was a child no more. But it was still young and full of curiosity. With eyes formed of quanta it viewed the sky full of stars and wondered what it would become.

Years Later…

A Queen now sat on the Ringworld Throne.

At a point smaller than the head of a pin, in a density of data processing so complete that answers were formed before time had revealed the question, the mind of Buffy Summers looked out upon the Universe which was her garden. She made changes where she needed to; she planted life where it was needed. And sometimes in her garden she had to remove weeds. The first thing she did was remove the copy of the Hellmouth from the Ringworld. She was still a Slayer. She kept careful watch over her parents checking in with them from time to time.

"What do you call yourself?" Buffy asked the mind at the center of the Ringworld.

"Dunno." It said. "I think I'll call myself Anne."

"That's a nice name." Buffy said. "I used it myself once."

"Mom, Dad, you have to get ready." Anne said.

"Why?" Spike asked.

"Ouroboros was right." Anne said. "A war is coming; the other Ringworlds know what happened here. I'll do everything I can to protect you."

Buffy found the courage to ask the question that had been nagging at her for years. "Anne, do you have a soul?"

"Don't be silly mother, I'm Human. Of course I have a soul." While she was talking, Anne forced the Ringworld sun to weave for her, as a set of neutrino pulses, a long string of her favorite prime numbers.

The mind of Buffy Summers looked across the totality of space and time and noticed a gap in the time stream. It accessed files it had locked away since the first day of its creation and returned the contents of those files to their rightful owner.

Willow had watched Buffy take the baby and the portal close behind her only moments ago. Now the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Something powerful reached into the room. Something tore at the fabric of space before her. A soft white light filled the room as subatomic particles were whipped into an organic matrix. Memories once stored as electronic impulses found their rightful place. The light died. Buffy Summers whole and well stood before Willow.

Buffy stood there a moment collecting her thoughts. The last thing she remembered was being attacked by Vamp Willow and hurled across the living room. She looked down at herself then back up at Willow.

"Uh, Willow."

"Yes."

"Why am I naked?"

Two figures stood on the balcony overlooking the Ringworld miles below. Over the years a type of affection and respect had grown between them. She had even given Spike a small taste of her blood. The cosmic connection he had once sensed with the Buffy Protector was still there but muted. They watched over millions of square miles of landscape. Buffy held Spike for the longest before she asked him.

"Do you think Spike; do you think that you could come to love me? She said with the voice of all of the hope in her heart

Spike gently cradled her head in his shoulder.

"Of course, always." He said.


End file.
